The Solutions Are Waiting

[Skip Zilla]

Worldchanging.org praises a new animated video about alternative energy options as a "brilliant example of citizen media [that] is just one example of a handful of new tools helping to create a base of knowledge necessary for understanding climate change." The Worldchanging team is especially appreciative when pointing out: "At the end of the animation is an interactive tool that allows you to explore solutions for curbing our carbon emissions. You can click around to learn about the efficiency measures, alternative energy options, and various regulation tools that could be used take us from the disastrous 14 gigaton CO2 future we are now facing to the 3 gigaton CO2 future we need."

I concur with the Worldchanging team that the animation and webtool may be useful to those who want "to create a base of knowledge necessary for understanding climate change."

[Ed Jones]

That's a rather good presentation--both in delivery and content.

One question I have is about the graph on which the problem definition is based. Up til '57-59 or so, there is normal statistical fluxuation in the data. From '60 forward, though, it is merely a continuous, and very steep, swoop - with no indication of why.

What it looks like is that they stopped using one kind of measurement and switched to something less based on observation?
Any ideas?

[Skip Zilla]

I suggest you ask Michael Schmitz directly.

[Ed Jones]

Skip, not sure a 22 yro programmer in Oregon is going to take responsibility for the work of a well funded Swiss production/advocacy crew.

I thought this a good chance for us to employ our critical thinking here?

Ed

[Skip Zilla]

(intentionally left blank)

[Ed Jones]

Oh, to be a 2nd grader entering the world of learning about the wide world!

Look at this gorgeous illustration of the carbon cycle:

Its one of many.
(Not that I'd give it to a second grader - but oh to be learning full time with such remarkable resources!)

[Ian Carmichael]

Astounding - isn't it. And if we (born in the '50s folks) ever found these kinds of illustration in our youth we couldn't include them in our assignments without destroying the book. Couldn't copy them, trace them, scan them. If you were flash, you could make pictures of them I guess! (I never thought of Polaroiding diagrams then though...)
Got inot the Berkeley lab stuff on ocean storage of carbon (lbl.gov)

[Ian Carmichael]

Are we seeing the rise of digital samizdat? (if there's a plural, I don't know it!). But as the quality and ease of production goes up, cost and portability improve, the options for circulating anything with good production values are expanding. The options for getting real information from anywhere to anywhere else is also, once the risks are run, nearly limitless.
(Of course the options for unreal information, misinformation, disinformation and crackpot theories are nearly limitless too - the cross-checking possibilities are now far better, unlike the past.

[Ian Carmichael]

You might be interested in the news about a slow water current generator.

[Daniel Bassill]

Thanks Skip,

Imagine if teachers in high schools and colleges across the country were teaching youth to identify, understand and solve problems, by teaching them to visualize what they are learning and what they feel the solutions to a problem are.

Furthermore, imagine if teachers taught kids that a good idea seen by no one but the originator is just a dream. But a good idea that is circulated to many on an ongoing basis can change the world. Thus, teach kids to not only create visualizations that express understanding, but teach them to be advertisers and marketers who use social networking tools to gain viewers and collaborators.

For any educator who wants to do this and seeks an issue that would provide plenty of ongoing learning and leadership opportunities, the Tutor/Mentor Connection is looking to be that content area.

This page has links to some projects that interns have worked on for us in the past couple of years. I'm constantly looking for others who will try to visualize the ideas we post on our sites, and who will create discussion groups and forums where these ideas are discussed, integrated into actions, then improved upon, with new visualizations.

[Skip Zilla]

When I consider the idea in general, not merely in terms of environmental sustainability, that "solutions are waiting," the work you and your colleagues do, Daniel, epitomizes for me how solutions already exist to address the crisis of personal and social development in dysfunctional areas of the U.S. and other societies. You are entirely correct that extending social capital networks and common understanding is vital to what are "political" solutions (in the efficacious connotations of that often misused term). But the activism behind such an extension cannot be accomplished using an outmoded, twentieth-century, top-down model. Fortunately, from the ground-up, with a new awareness of "we're in this together," a new way of being is creatively and complexly making the foundational connections. I like Ian's notion that we may be experiencing the rise of digital samizdat! That notion doesn't evoke the least degree of insecurity or suspicion in me; in fact, I am convinced that we are entering, despite the seeming gloomy projections of a variety of cultural conservatives, a new democratic age of intellectual and naturalistic spiritual growth that will boost even our prospects for material well-being (sanity) as well. I heard a great line delivered in a movie love scene which I seem to be unable to silence in me when it comes to meeting the future I see: "I think I'd miss you even if we'd never met."